Perpetual Optimism

A month or two ago I was sitting in the front seat of a taxi in Sofia (Bulgaria), when I caught a snippet of conversation from the back. All I heard was the phrase ‘perpetual optimism’, and that was it. Nothing further reached through the traffic noise. I glanced at the driver, but he didn’t seem that talkative (perhaps someone warned him), so I pondered instead.

How concise can you get? A phrase that manages to deliver more in two words than most paragraphs.

It was memorable enough to resurface in my brain through fog of the following morning. It must be important, somehow. Foolishly on the flight home I mentioned I might blog about it, and so here we are on an unintended quest.

What do we know about being positive?

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know a lot. There are lots of books telling us to be positive, and all the riches in the world will be ours, but it’s always a bit broad and unspecific – to someone who deals with specific words for a living at any rate. What does positivity actually mean?

Searching through the kindlesphere, I found a more thoughtful read by Psychology Scientist Barbara Fredrickson called positivity. A psychology person, in a new field apparently only invented in 1999, it seems that after scientists studied depression and anxiety for hundreds of years, it occurred to one of them that it may be generally connected to happiness. But enough of this snarky observation, on with the story.

It must be have been incredibly difficult to be scientific about ‘feelings’, but I was pretty impressed with the results.

(A picture of Google allows this post to be on a blog about lead generation)

Getting specific

Because I’ve been trained to think about the customer journey, I’ve re-ordered these elements of positivity described in the book.

I personally think that being positive is a journey. Hope is before everything.

Do we know the outcome?

Amongst other things, it has been proven that being positive is very good for your health, as long as it is heartfelt and ‘real’, yep, ok, tick. More interestingly,

compared to people in the other conditions, participants in experiments who experience positive emotions show heightened levels of creativity, inventiveness, and “big picture” perceptual focus.

Proven. Wow.

Getting stuff done

This post went from being drafted on my personal blog, to being promoted to the professional one about lead generation. My experience in completely different scenarios, with various shades of marketers, entrepreneurs and sales people. It is crystal clear that positivity gets things done, and negativity stalls people. Literally, work stops.

Without hope, nobody in the world is going to start anything. With it, mountains are moved pretty quickly.

Marketing, by default, is the practice of being really positive about things. But it requires positivity to come up with ideas, to write enthusiastically, to inspire confidence.

Can we change?

Of course, it’s a variable. We oscillate. But here’s the result of my unintended quest.

If we decide that we are positive, then it happens. Just like if we decide to smile then, eventually, we forget we are pretending. The effects can be amazing. Take a negative scenario that is coming up, be positive and then take notice of how people react – I did. It inspires people to change, and makes people more likely to take action (take a note blog copy ninjas).

I believe that we all genuinely want to be happy, someone just needs to go first. I’m sure there is plenty of advice around, but for me, the most important thing was, to decide it is important.

Looking through positivity tinted glasses

It’s been a couple of months, and I have found that actively taking notice of positivity has a really positive effect in itself. I realised that the people I liked most were all pretty positive, and some of them refused to be negative in any single sentence. I hadn’t noticed that before – perhaps they know this already, and I’ve spent all these years being uneducated. But then, it was only invented in 1999, so I don’t feel too bad.

Let’s all use less negative words. Particularly ban the ones that sound like “problem”.

According to our scientist Barbara, it is all connected, there is a golden ratio of 3-1. When we reach that ratio of positive versus negative reactions, then it builds on itself, spiralling to a point where we are naturally resilient.

Most people have heard of a new law involving website cookies. But if you haven’t, I hope you don’t have to be too concerned by it. We’re keeping a lookout and will let you know.

The “idea” is good, as it covers tracking people who go onto websites. And we agree that tracking visitors who have been personally identified should require their permission, that’s obvious to everyone.

Permission from anonymous visitors?

But getting permission from people who we don’t know, is not practical, and if anything, we think it will be more irritating to keep asking them.

How do you keep a track of the people who have asked not to be tracked?

Could you imagine someone measuring footfall through a shopping centre getting written permission from each shopper?

I only came in for a sandwich..

Would it be like getting written permission from everyone who wanders past a CCTV camera.

Question: Is this cookie law consistent with CCTV laws, we wouldn’t have thought so. We’ll ask an expert in cctv…our friend David at Demux who provides cctv analysis services.

A lot of companies seem to be adopting a wait and see attitude – including 95% of the top uk 100 websites from what we can see.

Having said that:

The law is clear, it does actually want us to get permission to set a cookie.

The thing is, if people say no, then we have to set a cookie. And if we can’t do that, then it looks like we’d have to ask them, not only every time they came back to the site, but also every page they visit. Too extreme, perhaps.

Our Solutions

1. We do have a privacy policy on each customer website now – even if you can’t see it.

(1.b We’re just enabling it by linking to it from the footers to comply with the spirit and letter of the law)

2. The cookie plugin on this site seems to work fine – with a few adjustments it will become legal.

3. Move country

Because as every company in this country ‘may be’ at a commercial disadvantage if they implement, we hope it changes soon.

Something changed. And it suddenly got a lot more colourful in the office.

Copy, Content and Distribution

Loads of copywriters have told us that they struggle to sell their own services , ironically, and I have seen customers actually screw up their noses at the mere mention of the word. I guess it’s one of those words that can mean different things to different people.

As a result, there is a lot of confusion around the purpose, the benefits, and the value.

But, what we know is that when we write pages on our customer websites

2. The number of visits to websites goes up

1. The number of leads goes up

As a company we need to be able to add that value. The more words you have on the website, the more relevant traffic you get. It’s simple really:

Words make web marketing work better, and they get to repeat themselves again and again, over a very long period.

If you work hard at knowing what to say, it gets even better.

And, so, we’ve been busy. In fact, we have been doing so many things for other people, that we had no energy to write our own!

That’s not right.

So, we are so very pleased to welcome Jessica McGinn to help us onto the next step, and I’m very sure our customers will be just as happy.

About Jess

Now, Jessica can write.

She gets ‘context’, and thinks about how words make people feel. Having said that, our Jess isn’t that worried about saying what she thinks about pretty much anything.

Which is why I’m not showing her this before I hit the publish button.

But whilst writing will be a very important skill for our little community going forward, managing that content in WordPress is just as important. Even if customers send us their own stuff, it still needs structuring for the web, editing and laying out.

We’ve seen already that being web dexterous will be a massive help in ‘getting things done’. And things are getting done faster around here. You’ll see.

A Learning Process

After 6 very solid, brain exploding weeks of learning at speed, we’re just about ‘ready to go’.

And I think we’ve spent useful time learning about learning, teaching, conversations, and all related to web marketing and sales. They say you never really know a subject until you’ve taught it, so I’m glad to have started on the content badge now.

So, I guess I ought to finish the intro and say, ‘Hi Jess’.

Here are some subjects you might choose for a first blog post. Or, choose something else, we’re only just getting going after all..

Blog technology has huge business benefits, but the best in business say it’s about more than that.

In the last few days, several people, in quite different industries told me they felt integrity was crucial to their business. Pointedly, they also said they were competing with people without.

Underneath I’m not sure they really believe that’s true, but what if all the good people wrote blog articles regularly? I like to think it would help us all rise above the blaggers – and in a very literal way, with Google in mind, it probably will do.

When you write stuff down, good things tend to happen.

A friend sent this to me, I’m guessing it’s because I’ve been too busy to write lately. Perhaps if they would be so kind as to send this over about once a week or so?

This time, a strange source. Not some wacky software entrepreneur, or some compelling life lessons for us this week –

Oh no….. it’s a presentation from Netflix, a monolith that is a publicly quoted company – they just shared a slide deck (meant to be read online) about HR.

Click image to Inspiration Page

Ok, so that shouldn’t be inspirational. But it sets out how it sees the development and most importantly the retention of talent within the company, and how to escape from HR as a business process…. their words, not mine!